DENVER -- Crime victims and others lost out on more than $1.2 million in restitution and other cash after the state Department of Revenue failed to withhold money from the tax refunds of people who owed restitution and fines, a CALL7 investigation found.

“That's a huge amount of money that doesn't go back to crime victims -- that' doesn't go toward making crime victims whole,” said Nancy Lewis, of the Colorado Organization for Victims Assistance. “It’s lost. It’s gone.”

Every year, state departments provide lists of people who owe money for various purposes, ranging from child support to victim’s restitution. State law allows the Colorado Department of Revenue to deduct that money from any state tax refunds to the person owing the money.

However, this year the programmer who handles the computer that does deductions was on sick leave and the substitute programmer did not properly load the program from the state Judicial Department because the judicial program is different from programs used by other departments, said DOR Executive Director Roxy Huber.

“And to those folks, I apologize. It certainly wasn't anything we intended to have happen and we repaired it as quickly as we became aware of it but it's always disappointing to me to say we didn't get something done that we should have,” Huber said.

Judicial officials noticed that their collections for February were about 10 percent of the previous year and called the Revenue department to find out what went wrong.

It took Revenue department programmers about a week to fix the problem, allowing as much as $600,000 to $800,000 of additional money to slip through to offenders, records and interview show.

“Every day that goes by compounds the problem," says a memo written a week after the problem was discovered. "There will be a lot of upset people if this problem is not corrected soon.”

“It wasn't delays because we just weren't getting to it,” Huber said. “It was just not a simple problem to fix."

Most of the money was supposed to go to victims’ assistance and compensation but other money that wasn’t withheld would have gone to the state road and general funds.

The state is now contacting people who mistakenly received the money to try and recoup it, but it’s unlikely the state will get all the cash back.

“Pretty good chance the state is not going to get all this money back?” CALL7 Investigator Tony Kovaleski asked.

“I would think that's a good chance at this point,” said state Court Administrator Jerry Marroney.

Huber promised that the mistake would not happen again.